How you talk to women, how you touch women, how you flirt with women, how you date women, how you bed women, how you relate to women after sex are all predictors of how you will do in a marriage to a woman. We date the way we mate. And the way we go after women will be similar to our other relationship patterns, including in the work place. Who you sleep with and how you sleep with them reveals you.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, it will come as no surprise to you that Fordy is widely known as a sensitive, generous lover. One woman called me the other day and we caught up. Back in the day, she used to go around LA and state, “Women should pay Luke Ford to make love to them.”
Just another satisfied customer. I don’t like to boast. We all have our own approaches to tikkun olam (repair of the world). Different people have different gifts.
I don’t know if the allegations against New York governor Andrew Cuomo are sufficient to force him from office, but I don’t think they’re nothing either and I don’t think they are irrelevant to the performance of his public duties. The line between public and private is always going to be permeable at unexpected times.
Everything we do affects other people. And people will put up with a lot of bad behavior in certain circumstances, and then the winds change and they won’t stand for it any longer.
When people hate you, they’re not usually going to tell you exactly why they hate you. A lot of people now feel comfortable stating they hate Andrew Cuomo. Bully and abuse is what they say they object to, but that’s probably just the line they think will be most effective to get what they want, just as the George W. Bush administration pushed the threat of weapons of mass destruction to make the case for invading Iraq in 2003.
I’ve noticed that when people hate me, they choose whichever attack will be most damaging, and that changes over time.
Bullying football coaches tend to have a short shelf life. The Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnsons, Jason Browns of the world don’t last long in their jobs.
Richard Spencer has a bullying style. It hasn’t worked out well for him.
I’ve been on TV a lot and I would often hear from women afterwards. The way I talked to these women on the phone or via text revealed who I was. I do a daily Youtube show and I often talk to women from around the world and if these private conversations were published on the front page of the New York Times, you would not be shocked. They reflect a similar personality to what which radiates from this blog — an Aussie bloke filled with radical love and inclusion.
A New York friend says:
I think Cuomo knows end is coming. The pot regulations rush is to set up his patrons and family with the licenses before out of office. Biggest moneymaker now for states going ‘green’ is the corrupt awarding of who gets licenses.
He did marry into Camelot (a Kennedy).
His fate was sealed minute Trump lost election.
His tough guy New York shtick wasn’t needed anymore to counter Trump’s bullying.
I remember saying that Cuomo might want Trump to win more than anyone in America. His path to presidency Biden/Harris 4-12 years was gone. The NYS progressives just see an old school Italian guy who does a poor job at pretending to be a social progressive for expedience sake.
In a cover story published by New York Friday, Rebecca Traister reports new allegations of inappropriate behavior by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has already been accused of misconduct by six women, including a former aide who alleges he groped her in private late last year, and now faces an impeachment inquiry.
Through interviews with more than 30 women who have worked or interacted with Cuomo, Traister finds that bullying was a defining element of his management style: “It’s an understanding of political power in which ruthlessness is read as greatness, abuse as passion,” she writes. Traister details the connections between his reported behavior and broader allegations of administration impropriety — including an alleged cover-up of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic. As one former staffer told her, “The same attitude that emboldens you to target a 25-year-old also emboldens you to scrub a nursing-home report.”
Another former staffer, Kaitlin, who asked that her last name not be published, described meeting the governor while working at a fundraiser in 2016. When they were introduced, she says Cuomo grabbed her “in a kind of dance pose” as a photographer took a picture. She recalled thinking, “This is the weirdest interaction I’ve ever had in my life. I was like, Don’t touch me. Everybody was watching.” The same week, she received a voice-mail from Cuomo’s office requesting that she interview for a job, though she never gave his office her contact information. “We all knew that this was only because of what I looked like,” Kaitlin told New York. “Why else would you ask someone to come in two days after you had a two-minute interaction at a party?”
Kaitlin says she was frequently pressured to dress expensively during her time in the Cuomo administration. “I did what I could with my clothes,” she said, “and it wasn’t good enough for them.” On some mornings when Cuomo started his day early, he would ask her if she “‘decided not to get ready today?’” It was clear to Kaitlin what he was doing. “I’d think, You’re such an asshole; you know you left early so I didn’t have time.” Her experience was not an outlier: Other women who worked in Cuomo’s office told New York that female aides were consistently told to dress up, and some were explicitly told by senior staff that they had to wear high heels whenever the governor was around (although Cuomo’s office denies this). Cuomo’s recruitment process also was not isolated: Kaitlin remembered that early in her tenure, he asked aides at a staff meeting to find a young woman he’d met at a party the previous night for a potential job.
In a separate article, journalist Jessica Bakeman, who covered the New York statehouse, describes experiencing a pattern of touching and remarks by Cuomo that she believes was intended to make her uncomfortable. “It’s not that Cuomo spares men in his orbit from his trademark bullying and demeaning behavior,” Bakeman writes. “But the way he bullies and demeans women is different.”
Traister also spoke with State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, an attorney and former Cuomo administration staffer who recalls being grabbed by the elbow at a party at the governor’s mansion weeks after joining his office in 2016. “He didn’t say ‘Welcome’ or ‘Thank you for being here,’” she said. “He said ‘Nice dance moves’ and walked away.” After she left her job to run for State Senate, she didn’t see Cuomo until August 2018. At a wedding that year, Cuomo came up to her, said hello, and pulled her in and kissed her on her head. “‘Are you jealous?’” she recalls him asking her fiancé, adding that “I didn’t feel sexually harassed. I felt like he was trying to make me feel uncomfortable, to disarm me.”
Several former aides describe experiences of sexism and racism. Ana Liss, who previously told the Wall Street Journal of belittling encounters with Cuomo, told New York that on one of her first days in the administration, the governor asked her, “Do you have a boyfriend?” He later came up with “flirtatious” nicknames for her. Camonghne Felix, the first Black woman to work as a speechwriter for Cuomo, eventually moved to the press team when she accepted he was never going to use her speeches. “It’s a very subtle form of racialized abuse,” she said. “You know I am beneficial to you. I fill a quota. It looks good on paper, and we made sure to put press releases out. But you don’t intend to incorporate me into the government. You just like to show me to people.”
Multiple staffers told New York that they began therapy and antidepressants for the first time while working for Cuomo. But the results never justified the abuse. “It was policy-making like paint-by-numbers,” one former staffer said. “The goal was superficial, as opposed to changing people’s lives.” The former aide said that policy was often secondary to the appearance of progress. “Someone from the inner circle would call and say, ‘The governor wants to go to Orange County. What can we announce?’”
MORE:
* Though the multiple scandals erupting in Albany seem to toggle between sexualized harassment stories and evidence of mismanagement, what is emerging is in fact a single story: That through years of ruthless tactics, deployed both within his office and against anyone he perceived as an adversary, critic, or competitor for authority, Cuomo has fostered a culture that supported harassment, cruelty, and deception. And while some have continued to defend Cuomo’s commitment to “creating the perception of strength,” and his mastery of “brutalist political theater” (as Mayor de Blasio’s former spokesman told the New York Times last month), his tough-guy routine has in fact worked to obscure governing failures; it is precisely what has permitted Cuomo and his administration to spend a decade being, to borrow Wertheimer’s assessment, both mean and bad at their jobs.
* Cuomo’s leadership style often confuses ruthlessness with greatness, abuse with strength. Interviews with dozens of former Cuomo employees and those who have worked with or adjacent to his administration reveal a governing institution that has been run, at times, like a cultish fraternity, and at others, like a high-school clique — a state executive chamber in which the maintenance of power, performance of pecking orders, and pursuit of competitive resentments matter as much as policy.
* In speaking with 30 women about their experiences with Cuomo, almost all who worked for him commented on the extreme pressure applied by both the governor and his top female aides to dress well and expensively; some were told explicitly by senior staff that they had to wear heels whenever he was around. Kaitlin was still paying off her student loans. “I did what I could with my clothes,” she said, “and it wasn’t good enough for them. I didn’t have designer stuff.” She remembered wearing a red plaid Gap button-down shirt she’d thought was cute, but the governor remarked that she looked “like a lumberjack.”
* Though Cuomo hasn’t been accused of anything like the violent crimes that Weinstein committed, he shares other traits with the now-imprisoned movie producer. For years, Weinstein’s famously bad temper and difficult workplace demeanor were understood simply as quirky symptoms of his genius, somehow permissible because everyone knew about them and no one did anything about them; it was just “Harvey being Harvey.” Cuomo’s behavior has also long been excused as Andrew being Andrew; just a powerful man being powerful. Like Weinstein, Cuomo regularly has people yell for him, including a phalanx of senior women whom he uses as a defensive feminist shield…
* For Cuomo, many people told me, a big part of winning means lying. “I was taught that it was totally fine to lie,” said Ana Liss. “Even as a peon, I was part of some of the lies and mischaracterization.” After the story of the nursing-home scandal broke, DeRosa was caught on tape acknowledging that data had been hidden to avoid attacks from the Trump administration, and subsequent reporting has shown that she and two of Cuomo’s other close advisers purposefully altered documents to obscure the truth.
“He makes things up like I’ve never seen anyone do before,” said Lipton. “He makes people who disagree with him feel like they’re crazy.” It’s a pattern that — like his narcissism, theatrical bombast, love of cameras, hatred of “experts,” and the fact that, as one national reporter who covered him said, “I don’t think he believes in much, except that he wants to be powerful”—makes Cuomo not the anti-Trump that many imagined him, but rather the 45th president’s Democratic twin.
* The sheer amount of interpersonal drama, anxiety, and rancor that former Cuomo staffers described was wholly exhausting, like something from The Devil Wears Prada.
* Those beaten down by the vicious workplace were also depressed that none of their misery was in service of effective governance or better policy. In fact, many told me, there was little interest in policy. “It was policy-making like paint-by-numbers,” said one former staffer. “The goal was superficial, as opposed to changing people’s lives. It was heartbreaking.” That didn’t mean that policy didn’t get enacted, she said, but it was second to and in service of optics. “Someone from the inner circle would call and say, ‘The governor wants to go to Orange County. What can we announce?’”
* It may have been the television adoration that precipitated the fall. In March, Cuomo began conducting his daily press briefings, performing charismatic calm in the face of panicky instability, ticking off daily numbers to combat the unknown; his updates became a soothing ritual. As Trump lied and tantrumed and overrode experts, Cuomo — a man of similar habits — was received as a competent balm.
* Just as Cuomo, who had long exerted such punishing and obsessive control over so many, was coming close to what he had always sought — the expansion of his power, the eclipse of his father’s legacy, a firm spot on the national stage and in the American imagination — he was starting to lose his grip on the political forces within his own state.
* One impression that emerges from Cuomo’s ten years in office is of an immense amount of time wasted. “He spends his days yelling at people who say bad things about him, rather than governing.”
